Alert:  I’m about to badmouth a famous dead guy.

By now we all know James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, is dead.  According to David Letterman this is significant because it means that now the hardest working man in show business is Regis Philbin.  I’d argue Nick Cannon, but whatever.  For black folk it’s significant for too many reasons to get into, especially since this article is not in praise of one of the greatest entertainers of our time.  You can find that kind of article anywhere.  This is concerning his five year old son, a little boy that was left out of his 73 year old father’s will. 

Now we can make the excuse that it’s just like black folk to be sloppy in handling their business and leave it at that, but that would be wrong, stereotypical, and as ignorant as it gets. (In this case sadly it’s true.   One of the most successful musicians of EVER didn’t update his will after the birth of his 7th child five years ago.  But I digress.)  If I’m not mistaken the almost 100 year old (I’m rounding) husband of Anna Nicole Smith was a billionaire and he didn’t even have a coherent plan on how to dole out his estate among his family and his then 26 year old wife, and he was as white as they come.  So look at it for what it probably is and that’s another dad failing to protect his child’s future because of his questionable feelings about his “baby mama.”

Let’s briefly examine the facts (ok some of this may be rumor and innuendo).  Tomi Raye Hynie, the mother of Mr. Brown’s child, is not well liked.    Immediately following his death she was locked out of the Brown mansion and claimed homelessness, only for us to later find out that she lived in a house around the corner.   At the funeral Rev. Al Sharpton, a good friend of t